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fintanr's weblog

Tuesday Dec 06, 2005

I was going to compare one of the new UltraSparc-T1 machines to
some other boxes, but as there is nothing of a similar size,
packing a similar punch, anywhere on the planet I figured
let's let the T2000 speak for itself........

# uname -a
SunOS oaf251 5.11 snv_27 sun4v sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-T2000

A view from the front

Occasionally a picture is not worth 1000 words[1], or 32 cpu threads...

Tuesday Oct 18, 2005

A good while ago I managed to christen myself with a nickname within my group of Grumpy, more in a reaction to being called Whiney, who is not generally known as one of the dwarfs, but does happen to be a member of my team (I'll let him own up to this himself). The original context was along the lines of someone calling my Whiney, and I replied, "thats not me, I'm grumpy". As you might guess the name stuck. Anyway Niall was over in California recently, and while wondering through a Disney store with his better half spotted an apt mug..... so I give you....

Monday Sep 12, 2005

Sun released a bunch of cool new boxes today, which we have been using internally for a little while now. One of the guys in my group, Niall Mullen (who joins the blogosphere today as well) has a few pics of the boxes and a nice walk through some of the cooler features up here. He spares you the press release jargon, and show you the real deal. But to put it simply these run faster, cooler and cheaper than anything else that any other vendor is making.

Friday Aug 26, 2005

Slashdot stories can be annoying and petty at the best of times, but an article today regarding a Microsoft employee who has gotten adult measels is definately a new low. One of my colleagues had this recently - its damn serious, not something to make fun of. At least some of the folks commenting on the article see it the same way.

Friday Jul 15, 2005

I tend to avoid non work related stuff on this blog, but as this is impacting my ability to work from home, I guess its semi work related. I just wrote up a small piece about my current broadband fiasco over on my personal blog.

Tuesday May 24, 2005

So our manager (or ex-engineer as we prefer to call him) has joined bsc, drum roll please....... introducing Damien Farnham. Back in his engineering days he worked on things such as TPC and the like (predominantly focused on Sybase). Or so he likes to tell us ;). These days he does all of that management stuff that us engineers like to avoid ;).

Tuesday May 03, 2005

After my post about getting libnjb to compile on Solaris I got a couple of comments around uint\*_t types, and why we defined uint's in the manner that we do. Mainly because the convention we use is a standard, as per Ansi C99, the Single Unix Specification (which supercedes Posix and XPG).

Unfortunately all of these specs cost money to download (something of a bone of contention with me, open standards should be free to view), but the best online explanation that I can find is available in this article by Michael Barr over on O'Reilly. From that article I quote

In hindsight, it sure would have been nice if the authors of the C standard had defined
some standard names and made compiler providers responsible for providing the appropriate
typedef for each fixed-size integer type in a library header file. Alternatively, of
course, the C standard could have specified (as Java does) that each of the types short,
int, and long has a standard width on all platforms; but that can have an impact on
performance, particularly on 8-bit processors that must implement 16- and 32-bit additions
in multi-instruction sequences.
Interestingly, it turns out that the authors of a 1999 update to the ISO C standard
(hereafter "C99") did just that. It seems the ISO organization has finally put the weight
of its standard behind a preferred set of names for signed and unsigned fixed-size integer
data types. The newly defined type names are as follows:
8-bit: int8_t uint8_t
16-bit: int16_t uint16_t
32-bit: int32_t uint32_t
64-bit: int64_t uint64_t

So there you go.

[ update - 05/05/05 ]
A couple of people have commented that you can access the Unix O3 spec here, thanks for the clarification. Anyone got a url for a C99 spec that they can point us at?

Tuesday Apr 26, 2005

I see Oracle are echoing what many customers have been saying about Linux patches in this article over on the register.

"Speaking at the Software 2005 conference in Santa Clara, California, on Tuesday, Phillips told an audience of 1,000 chief executive officers: "[Customers] are bogged down by the dependencies between applications. Add a patch in Linux and five other things break. People ask: 'Why can't you tell me what the dependencies are?'"

This is exactly why binary compatability and interface stability are important. If you can't add patches with the confidence that your production systems will stay up, and that your applications will stay running on them, you can only be nervous. And it is also why Sun invests a huge amount of time into testing patches.

Tuesday Apr 19, 2005

Poor error messages are a major source of annoyance. I hit this one today, for the first time in a few years. Background info - a v210 was rather abruptly powered down and feeling somewhat ill. So I logged onto the sc and got to my console, and type boot as one does.

{1} ok boot
FATAL: system is not bootable, boot command is disabled

Which is about as helpful as someone telling me the box is currently a brick. Which I know already.
Anyway just in case you happen to hit this the fix/workaround is to set auto-boot? to false, reset the box, and then set it to true and finally boot as shown below.

One of the other folks in my group, Nicky Veitch, has started his blog, joining Sean, Gleb and myself. Of interest straight away are his notes on filebench - a benchmark that will be released soon onto sourceforge ( Richard leads the design and development off filebench).

Thursday Apr 07, 2005

I noticed that Richard McDougal has started a blog, joining his partner in crime Jim Mauro. These guys authored Solaris Internals, a book that is used by everyone in our group on an almost daily basis. They are currently updating it for Solaris 10, it will be an invaluable resource once it comes out. Point your aggregators at their blogs, highly recommended.

In the meantime they have some teasers in the form of two presentations posted on the Solaris Internals site, well worth a read.

Friday Mar 11, 2005

I've avoided non technical posts for a while, but this one should be mentioned. Sun matched any donations that employees made to Tsunami Relief funds through the Sun Microsystems Foundation. I got the following mail in my inbox today (edited as the amount is my own business).

Date: March 11, 2005
Thank you for using the Sun Microsystems Foundation, Inc.
Matching Gifts Program. This is to advise you that we have
received your request to match your $personal donation to
American National Red Cross (for Tsunami Disaster Relief)
dated January 4, 2005.
Matching gift payments are made on a quarterly basis. A
matching gift payment of $personal will be sent to American
National Red Cross - Fairfax, VA, by the end of April 2005.

People have asked me why I work in Sun, theres several thousand examples of why on blogs.sun.com, as an engineer it was a place I want (and wanted in college) to work in, but its intangible things such as the reasons behind the mail above that just push it that little bit beyond other places I have worked in. (I can hear the naysayers going "oh, but everywhere does this now", well Sun's being doing it for quite a bit longer, and in many, many ways, and long before CSR became a buzzword in board rooms - with the consultants, consultancy fees and press releases that go with such buzzwords).

Wednesday Dec 08, 2004

Got stung with this for a while today, so for the benefit of others....

I had just installed an internal development version of the Sun Java System Application Server and restored a SpecJAppServer2002 domain. Within in a domain you have a script startserv (and another stopserv) which are called by the asadmin commmand when you start and stop a domain respectively.

Anyway after a bit of fiddling around I figured out that the problem is that you need to have startserv with permissions of 755, a simple chmod 755 startserv and everything is back in business.
In reality your very unlikely to hit this problem if you go through the normal steps for creating and restoring a domain, but as I said on the off chance that your taking a shortcut like me.